Bredesen wants to explore 5-year high schools
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Bredesen, a Democrat who is running for re-election this fall, said he would use his second term to explore starting five-year high school programs aimed at graduating students with professional skills.
“If we can put that together, we’ll both get high school graduation rates up and get college participation rates up,” Bredesen said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
If students spend two years earning an associate’s degree while still in high school, they would be much better prepared to enter the job market upon graduation, he said.
One field that could lend itself to the five-year plan could be nursing.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in December projected that registered nursing will create the second largest number of new jobs among all occupations by 2014.
“If you’ve got an RN today, you can basically write your ticket,” Bredesen said. “It’s a very good place to be if you’re willing to work.”
Bredesen said his thoughts on five-year high schools emerged from round-table discussions with educators about how to best prepare high school students for college. The governor said he was told many seniors weren’t taking rigorous coursework in their last year in high school.
Redesigning the high school curriculum to add the courses needed for an associate’s degree is easier to do “if there’s really kind of an extra year in there anyway,” Bredesen said.
The five-year high schools plan is one of several education proposals Bredesen would make in a second term, he said. The governor previously announced his plan to expand the state’s pre-kindergarten program to have enough classrooms to accommodate all 4-year-olds whose parents want to send their children to one.
“The emphasis on that isn’t that it happens to be my favorite program or something,” Bredesen said. “I just think all the evidence is that it’s as good as it gets when it comes to additional investment in education.”
Bredesen’s likely Republican opponent in November, state Sen. Jim Bryson, wasn’t impressed by Bredesen’s proposals.
“It’s another brass-plate program we don’t need until we fix the problems we currently have with graduation rates,” Bryson spokesman Lance Frizzell said.
Bryson has suggested that teaching job-specific skills at high schools or offering more Internet-based classes to rural schools would improve graduation rates. He also supports greater access to charter schools and more choice of public schools for parents.
Bryson is also hesitant to expand the pre-kindergarten program, Frizzell said.
“You’re creating a bigger program there, when we’ve yet to figure out how to improve our high school graduation rates,” he said.